Drive

DRIVE

TIM FALCONER

DRIVE

A ROAD TRIP THROUGH OUR COMPLICATED

AFFAIR WITH THE AUTOMOBILE

VIKING CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published 2008

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

Copyright © Tim Falconer, 2008

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval

system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both

the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Pages 327–29 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Falconer, Tim, 1958–

Drive : a road trip through our complicated affair with the automobile / Tim

Falconer.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-670-06569-1

1. Automobiles—Social aspects. 2. Automobiles. I. Title.

ISBN-13: 978-0-670-06569-1

ISBN-10: 0-670-06569-2

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

www.penguin.ca/corporatesales
or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

FOR CARMEN

“The evil genius of our time is the car,” Barry Byrne, an elderly architect, observed several years ago. “We must conquer the automobile or become enslaved by it.” … Less than a year after our conversation, Mr. Byrne, on his way to Sunday mass, was run down by a car and killed.

— From the introduction to
Working
, by Studs Terkel (1972)

Contents

1 Toronto Cars. Can't Live With ‘Em, Can't Live Without ‘Em

2 The Border Leaving Minivan Nation

3 Detroit Motor City Sadness

4 Interstate 69 Amateur Driver on a Crowded Road

5 Indianapolis Road Trips, Pilgrimages and Other Journeys

6 Interstate 70 The Automobile as Living Room

7 St. Louis Sedentary Behind a Steering Wheel

8 Route 66 (Part One) Kicks, Flicks and Tailfins

9 Route 66 (Part Two) Oil, Booze and Automobiles

10 Route 66 (Part Three) The Long and Lucrative Road

11 US 285 Drivers Wanted

12 Colorado Springs “More Than I Need, Less Than I Want”

13 Glendale “The Biggest Wins”

14 Denver Pedestrians Wanted

15 Las Vegas Muscle Bound for Glory

16 San Francisco Man versus the Internal Combustion Engine

17 The Pacific Coast Highway Conflicted

18 Los Angeles Suburbs in Search of a City

19 The Road Home Avoiding Carmageddon

Appendix: Car Song Playlist

Acknowledgments

Trademark Notices

Index

DRIVE

1
Toronto
Cars. Can't Live with

'Em, Can't Live without 'Em

EVEN THOUGH I LEFT EARLY
to avoid the worst of the Friday afternoon snarl, the city roads are thick with cars and I don't reach the highway as quickly as I'd hoped. Once I do, three lanes of high-speed congestion surround my car. I'm heading north to a cottage for the weekend, but suburban sprawl mars the landscape for most of the next hour; the subdivisions seem to creep a little farther every time I drive up here and I feel old remembering how all this land was nothing but fields when I was a kid. As soon as the traffic eases and I hit open road, and the dispiriting tract housing gives way to lush farms and dense forest, I sit back, crank the tunes a little louder and step on the gas. Within an hour, I will be lakeside, far from the smog, a cold beer in my hand—though it's not just my destination that makes me happy. My car is not a convertible, but as I rejoice in the speed, the power and the freedom it offers, I imagine the sun on my face and the wind in my thinning hair. I press the pedal a little harder. I feel exhilarated.

That doesn't mean I don't feel guilty. I do. After all, I'm contributing to the traffic I curse, I'm spewing greenhouse gases and other harmful emissions and I'm part of the reason we build cities for cars instead of people (not that we're doing even that well). Most North Americans, and increasingly those in other countries, have convinced themselves that a car is a necessity. I'm not that addicted, but my relationship to the automobile—a complicated mix of desire and disgust—is still a powerful one. While car lovers can make a passionate case for the object of their affection and car haters can marshal the facts against it, most of us are conflicted: the more we've allowed ourselves to be sucked into
the car's considerable charms, the more brutal and complete our subjugation to it has become. If intelligent life forms on a distant planet ever bothered to study our civilization, they would surely conclude that the vehicles were the dominant creatures while the humans, who build roads, provide warm, dry spots to park and do the cleaning and fixing, were the servants.

The closer the aliens looked, the more baffled they would become. Even as road engineering and automobile safety have improved dramatically, the death toll remains ludicrously high: 1.2 million people die on the world's roads each year. The thirst for oil has led to many conflicts around the world, including two wars in the Persian Gulf and civil unrest in Nigeria, and it threatens environmentally sensitive habitats. All the while, the humans fret about their tailpipe toxins, lament the lost hours spent stuck in traffic and cluck at the urban sprawl that makes no economic, environmental or aesthetic sense.

BEYOND ITS PIVOTAL ROLE
in our day-to-day lives, the automobile has worked its way into our psyches. From the sunny California of the Beach Boys to the darker New Jersey of Bruce Springsteen, the car is a central image in American music. And from the chicken run in
Rebel Without a Cause
to the main-street cruising in
American Graffiti
to every road trip movie ever made, the car plays an essential role in film. It's not just that the automobile is a handy device for storytelling. Through music, movies, television and literature—and advertising—vehicles have become metaphors for freedom and symbols of status and success.

Though it started developing earlier, the iconography of the car generated by movies and music really took hold in the 1950s and 1960s, when the automobile posed no pressing problems. With the building of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, the American economy boomed. People moved around easily and trucking quickly became the preferred shipping method. But it didn't take long for the true cost of these freeways to surface:
bypassed towns slowly withered and died while inner-city neighbourhoods succumbed to a similar fate quickly because of expressway construction. That led to a flight to the suburbs, exacerbating the urban sprawl the highways had already spurred. Today, it's no stretch to live without a car in a few cities—and in Manhattan, it's actually advisable—but I wouldn't want to try it in Atlanta or Houston.

And yet, for some people, a car is still an
objet d'art
to be collected and fawned over, though perhaps seldom driven. Talk show host Jay Leno has more than 150 cars, trucks and motorcycles, and a full-time staff to keep them running. No doubt buying and maintaining a fleet of collectible cars puts little strain on Leno's fortune, but for most regular folk, a vehicle is the second-most expensive purchase they'll ever make. And between loan payments, insurance, gas, maintenance, parking and other costs, some people spend more each month to keep their car going than they do on their rent or their mortgage. That's even more likely for those with more than one set of wheels: so many families insist on owning several—they should be thankful they don't live in Bermuda, where automobile ownership is limited to one per household—that the United States now has more vehicles than drivers. Americans, who represent just 5 percent of the global population, own 200 million of the more than 520 million cars in the world.

This proliferation has shaped where and how we live. Many businesses, from drive-in cinemas to drive-thru banks, cater to those behind the wheel (and often exclude those on foot). No wonder people say we either love cars or we need them. Even some activists dedicated to protesting against the auto and oil industries and to promoting environmental awareness find they have no choice but to own what they hate—or at least take a lot of taxis.

CITY DWELLERS COME IN
three categories: drivers (and passengers), cyclists and pedestrians. Each one can't stand the other two.
Drivers have nothing but contempt for pedestrians who jaywalk or, even when crossing the street legally, take too long, and they detest cyclists who sneer at the rules of the road. Cyclists despise drivers because too many of them refuse to admit bike riders have a right to be on the road and they hate pedestrians the way a bully hates the smallest kid in the playground. Pedestrians fear and loathe aggressive and distracted drivers, especially the ones who prefer yakking on a cell phone to paying attention, and they dread and abhor cyclists who won't obey stop signs and seem to take joy in running down people on sidewalks.

I am a pedestrian.

My first choice has long been to walk whenever possible, but I always intended to get my licence. Someday. Owning a set of wheels isn't essential where I live, so I was able to avoid getting a driver's licence until I was in my late thirties. Finally, a friend who was a magazine editor asked me if I wanted to rent an RV for two weeks and write about it. Turning down such a fun assignment was so painful—and felt so pathetic—that I decided it was finally time to grow up. Driving
seemed
like the adult thing to do. And so I joined the ranks of the drivers, and then, a few years later, the owners.

When I finally did, I regretted having waited so long. True, my 1991 Nissan Maxima, my first—and so far, only—automobile, is no aficionado's idea of a sweet ride. Light blue (or Silver Blue, according to the manufacturer), the body is still in good shape, but it's old, and even when it was new, it wasn't the most stylish car on the road. The horsepower isn't impressive, and I don't spend any time tinkering with it, let alone tricking it out. I don't even use it that much. In the summer, I love to escape the city without cadging a ride from friends, but in the winter, it just sits on the street for days until I throw two sticks and a big equipment bag into the back seat and drive to a hockey arena. Since 1999, I've added just sixty thousand kilometres to the hundred thousand that were already on the odometer. I certainly could live without a car, and I know I should, but I don't want to give it up.